


you lack the season of all natures

by Matloc



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Addiction, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Descent into Madness, Insomnia, M/M, Vanilla shake x Shakespeare, please do not take this fic seriously, prince!Kuroko, what am I doing with my life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 19:45:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5714902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Matloc/pseuds/Matloc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[alternatively titled, Shakespeare’s musings on vanilla shakes]</p><p>They say a human can go eleven days without sleep. Tetsuya only has three more left to his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you lack the season of all natures

**Author's Note:**

> Inspirations drawn from Macbeth, King Henry IV and Sonnet 3 laughs awkwardly

Prince Tetsuya doesn’t look at mirrors.

If he does, he will see himself between shades of corrosion. His skin will be touched by warning colors of Death, bruises from a sleepless night cradling sunken blue eyes. A ghost dwells in his skin, a white premonition drawing him closer into eternity’s slumber.

But he does not look at mirrors. For he is a prince, and princes shall not die until they’ve ruled as kings.

He starts telling himself this as a child. When a day’s fatigue tucks him under silk sheets, but rest does not come to him. He’d spend the night he’d owed to sleep instead watching the moon. Its feathered edges would be imprinted into the back of his eyelids by the time the sun rises to take its place. His body wouldn’t be kind to him that day, nor the next, nor the one after, when sleep starts to elude him night to night.

It’s his nurse who notices, her worried eyes dart back and forth from the tray in her hands to the prince’s pale features. Sitting up in his bed, gaze lost at nothing in particular. The woman bites her lip then excuses herself, taking back an untouched meal.

Soon she comes back carrying a smaller tray. A goblet sits in the middle, its golden gleam muted by dusk. He accepts out of pity, not wishing to damn her to a whip’s mercy for never noticing her master’s ailment. Tetsuya reckons he must be hard to notice in the first place.

Inside the chalice he sees a liquid sloshing around and leave milky trails to coyly slide down the inner edge. Though its consistency looks much thicker than anything he has taken. The rich drink quivers in the cup as he takes it to his lips, letting an unfamiliar sweetness wash over his palate. Unfamiliar, but not unwelcome, he decides. He gives her his thanks, wishing her sweet dreams in his stead.

That night he’d dream of floating in the clouds.

He doesn’t ask for it again, not until another inauspicious night loses him sleep. His nurse is ready with the concoction this time, entering his chambers at the cusp of midnight without so much as a summons. When she goes out, an empty goblet shimmers on her tray, and she’s closing the door on a sleeping prince.

It becomes tradition, then, for the prince to have a sip of his new favorite on long nights, to beckon sweet dreams.

A decade of this nurtures in him a loath appetite. As calls for the drink double up with court duties being stacked on shoulders much too small, much too young. As his body aches for sleep to come dull its senses, his mind stays prisoner to ink-stained quills and parchment on outstanding debts and loans and invitations to debutante balls he never once hesitates to reject.

Complaints arise more often than not, for apparently tossing away lavender-dabbed letters in one ever-growing pile is too informal a rejection for his ministers to accept. Tetsuya lends to these portly old men maybe half an ear, because sending a letter of apology to every daughter-borne noble is more taxing than ending wars. They’ll tut at him like overbearing parents—satchels of gold coins for children—in their bejeweled coats, cursing their prince’s heart too weak that he’d keep his suitors in the dark about his utter disinterest.

How long will you keep this up, they scold sometimes. When embittered rhetoric and growling bellies run their tongue loose.

Forever, Tetsuya prefers, but that has never been an option. Not for a prince.

Of course, the palace has more than just its gold-digging councilmen to fret over the prince. His antics arouse a transparent concern from the rest; it flickers over everyone’s faces as they throw hushed glances at lavish doors barring all visits. Save for his nurse, who only ever enters balancing a heavy goblet on a silver tray.

His need for the milk-based concoction has evolved into daily routine over the years. Six times a day; his stomach quails in revulsion—because he eats far less than he drinks—treats the milk like slow poison.

Tetsuya cares not for taste nor thirst, only compulsion asks the chalice closer. He almost wrinkles his nose at the sickeningly sweet smell, but his nurse is looking at him and traces of worry seem to crowd her eyes. The years haven’t been kind to her, Tetsuya thinks surely he is to blame for the early wrinkles. No need for mirrors when the faces of people around him reflect a truth just as cruel.

With only skeletons for fingers, he tips the cup over his mouth and tries not to choke on heavy fluid. Or on the vindictive rush of bile that instantly follows.

In times like these he’s most grateful for finding a fond companion in darkness. It visits without fail, draping its loyalty over reflections that haunt his people. So when the night soaks up all colors and sleep fails to conquer his mind, the guilt is as faint as the trembling candlelight in his nurse’s hand, when she comes in hours later, flimsy shawl thrown over her shoulders, to see the prince still awake.

He sits on his bed, listless like an unfinished statue. A flame of disappointment dances in the nurse’s eyes, quickly extinguished with a silent blow on the candle. She apologizes for intruding—he pretends not to listen—and leaves him in the dark once more.

They say a human can go eleven days without sleep. Tetsuya only has three more left to his life.

 

* * *

 

 

The concoction no longer works. It hasn’t for quite some time now, but Tetsuya only admits to himself once the despair culminates. In his bile-bloated belly, in shaky steps and uneven breathing. In its light his mind grows delirious, screaming at him to drink more more _more_.

He chugs his tenth dose while the sun’s still hanging high up in the sky. It glares at him, in burning disgust. It must be, because the sunlight scorches skin to bone, merciless as it boils the fluids in his stomach until they’re bubbling over—and soon Tetsuya’s bent over in a bright corner of his bedroom, retching white poison.

 _More_ , a voice still screams through the blood rushing to his head. He needs to drink more, let it overflow and drown him to sleep.

He can finally breathe when there’s nothing left in him but a dying wisp of strength. Spent on a bony arm groping blindly for cloth. He tugs with weak fingers, pulling a velvet sheet up to his mouth. The rest of the drapery slips off slowly with the movement, revealing a horrified face trapped inside his full-length mirror.

Bloodshot eyes stare back at him, a stormy sea brimming in their sunken depths. His face looks colored in with chalk, doesn’t look like his own anymore. It must be Death greeting him in reflections. A waking nightmare that _won’t leave, won’t ever leave until he finally dies_ —

A shadowy limb stretches from an upper corner, shaped as if it’s been cast by an invisible tree until it starts to swirl into itself. It grows quickly, a billowing cloud that soon bleeds into a fuzzy shape, and as Tetsuya blinks, the sunlight chases it away. Leaving behind what’s most definitely not a human.

Not with those serpentine red eyes studying his fallen form through the mirror. Tetsuya braves a look over his shoulder to find nothing, no red-haired caricature of a man standing near the bed, no sign of fading shadows in this sunbathed room.

“Tetsuya,” a voice, smooth as the velvet clutched in his hands, calls out.

His head whips back to the mirror. His heart shudders in his ribcage as Tetsuya holds the sharp gaze with wary eyes. Akin to a rabbit approaching a foreign object that shines its allure across the entire field. So deep in its red that he might just see blood crystallizing in the creature’s eyes.

They glint sharply, often times a predator’s sole warning. But it doesn’t quite feel the same with this one. It looks too self-assured. Not entranced by thrill born from stepping foot on hunting ground, when it instead shows up with all the nonchalance of treating the prince’s bedchambers as little less than an open invitation sealed by glass.

“Tetsuya.” It extends an arm from a void of black robes. Tetsuya catches hints of limbs so white, surely, they belong on mannequins. “Come,” it tells Tetsuya, long, spindly fingers spread out on the glass like a burst flowerbud.

“Won’t you come?” It tries again but Tetsuya is a crownless effigy in his silence. “I will lay you to rest.”

 _Rest._ Tetsuya’s soul weeps. _Rest…_

The mirror shatters in an instant, breaking all semblance of the unreality it had woven into existence. Leaving behind only a shadow to evaporate into Tetsuya’s garments. Clumps of glittering shards decorate the floor underneath his legs, which he carefully tries to avoid as he limps his heavy body to bed.

If he hadn’t, perhaps he would have seen in that diamond dust reflections of manacles, foggy and bumping around white ankles.

 

* * *

 

 

Night falls like black rain, soaking everything without light. Let them swim in this convergent pool of darkness, where the only stars are born from tired flames inside Tetsuya’s lantern. His arm’s feeling the numbness that follows a strenuous hour of pulling himself over an array of walls as a plan to maneuver around palace guards. He sneaks out successfully with the knowledge that he’s not meant for contingency planning, after coming dangerously close to being spotted—the randomness of bathroom breaks was never factored into his fool-proof strategy.

His other hand lies pinned to his side, fiddling with a fat ring. Sole proof of being heir to the crown. Though its weight has already made a slave out of him years before it gets to embellish his head.

Tetsuya’s thoughts are eclipsed by the soft fiery glow, letting it lead him through the forest that sits and murmurs darkly behind kingdom walls. Stopping for not a single moment to reflect: what is he doing, when he knows where this will lead to? Has the sweet deity of dreams left Tetsuya so deprived he’s forgotten all the sinister tales surrounding the green behemoth, studded with trees that seem to tear through skies, with a canopy of leaves that swallow sunlight, plunging its denizens into an eternal season of nightfall?

Or perhaps, in his delirium, he has simply forgotten to care.

The demon must have predicted this, for it emerges from its midnight blinds once Tetsuya has walked far enough. It looks even paler—even less human—surrounded by the void, but Tetsuya isn’t faring any better.

It smiles at him invitingly, hiding behind its thin lips what Tetsuya imagines to be an entire, grinning row of razor-sharp teeth. Ready to tear through what’s left of his muscle and bone. But if that’s the cost he must bear to lose himself to dreams once more, then so be it.

Its eyes take a rusty gleam, hinting at visceral vagaries, only the creature doesn’t move an inch. It’s waiting patiently. It’s waiting because Tetsuya takes a step forward and whatever its desires are have materialized in the prince’s wake.

“Truly an honor, prince.”

It spreads out its arms and swoops down to the ground on one knee. Tetsuya’s reaction has less emotion than a god carved from stone as the creature takes his right palm, if only to show his surprise at the gentle hold, pressing a kiss to his ruby ring.

He never says a word in reply, not even when it slides off the ring from his finger and crushes it to dust. The creature looks up, smile still in place. Is its human face used to luring people like that? Will it tell Tetsuya he came of his own accord—because surely that wouldn’t be a lie. Not completely.

With a sweet voice that makes Tetsuya’s vision blur, it says, “Now you are free.”

**Author's Note:**

> Featuring jar’s haiku:
> 
>  
> 
> _Oh this delicate_
> 
>  
> 
> _Grace on my tongue and I know_
> 
>  
> 
> _How heaven tastes_


End file.
